Yes -- but watch what happens when they can't pay their bills, their pension funds collapse, and no one wants to buy their debt. It will be difficult to tell the difference.
Yup. As a certain permabear blogger from Florida likes to say, math doesn’t care about man-made “laws”.
” It will be difficult to tell the difference.”
theoretically, it would be WAY WAY worse than if the protection of a bankruptcy court was available to them ... without that, their inability to pay their bills, repay their bonds, pay their entitlements, and pay their pensions would likely result in total chaos ...